


As I Escape to Mine

by theunknownthey



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Amalgamates, Dream Sequence, Gen, Handplates, Oneshot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-18
Updated: 2021-03-18
Packaged: 2021-03-26 23:40:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30113802
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theunknownthey/pseuds/theunknownthey
Summary: Dr Alphys is the royal scientist, right? So why does her lab not feel like her own? Why doesn't she remember writing these reports with her name on them?...Why does she feel a presence trying to reach her from somewhere else?Handplates oneshot - Alphys has nightmares about Gaster, too
Relationships: Alphys & W. D. Gaster
Comments: 1
Kudos: 9





	As I Escape to Mine

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Handplates](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/778446) by Zarla. 



> This is going to make absolutely no sense if you're not familiar with the Handplates comics. The darker elements are left only implied here. I would also recommend checking out [this side-comic](https://www.deviantart.com/zarla/art/Did-you-doublecheck-the-powerpoint-691158561) for an excellent summary of Alphys and Gaster's relationship in Handplates.
> 
> Set after Gaster falls into the CORE, around the time of the other dream sequences.

Alpbys dreamed.

Lately, she found it easier to judge whether she was asleep than whether she was awake – to make a type I error about her conscious state. Or maybe, given the occasional eerie occurrences in the lab even before the amalgamates came around, maybe it made more sense to treat dreaming as the null hypothesis...

"Alphys, what have you done?"

She hadn’t heard or seen the words, but she understood them just the same. And that meant she was dreaming. And their speaker- their speaker...

"D-doctor G----r?" How had she forgotten Dr Gaster? He had counseled her through her robotics work, praised her - genuinely praised her - when it was deserved, the Royal Scientist whose shoes she had, reluctantly, stepped into. "Dr Gaster, I need your-" And she was abruptly stumbling over apologies, sobs, and pleas, sentences getting all tangled up in each other as she tried to explain, backtracking when her words sounded too much like hollow excuses or painted her as so incompetent they shifted blame onto others. "It's the DT! The dosages aren't right. I just have to adjust the dosage, and it'll w-work. I swear. I promised. I told everyone they could go h-h-home." Her stuttering devolved into full-body sobs. She could feel Gaster's hands on her - his real hands and his magic hands, both sets bearing a conspicuous tactile absence in the palms. Oh no. She knew how awkward Gaster could get about other people's feelings, and now she was making a mess of everything, making it all about herself, putting him out of his comfort zone...

"Alphys, I can't help you if you won't pull yourself together. Think clearly. What was your task and how did you set about doing it?"

Right. Dr Gaster always had a way of keeping things grounded, cutting down to the facts of the situation at hand, rather than getting bogged down by the catastrophizing her anxiety-spiralling mind would vomit on top. "K-king Asgore wanted me to st-study the human SOULs. To see what properties they had that the barrier - if there were an alternative to absorption to breaking the barrier. A-artificial SOULs weren't..." Her brow furrowed. "They weren't considered an option." But she couldn't remember why. "We n-needed to use monster SOULs."

Gaster's hands stilled. "Where did you get these SOULs?"

"M-monsters who had fallen down. The king a-asked around."

The tension that had come into Gaster's grip eased somewhat. "Asgore authorized this? He knew your plans or... he suggested the idea?"

"S-sort of." At least being in a dream, Alphys found it easier to be open. She didn't have any sense of the expression on Gaster's face; just the gentle pressure of his hands supporting her. "He t-told the families that their r-r-relations would be used to research means of breaking the b-barrier. I don't think he told them I'd be using sera extracted from the human SOULs - he suggested study their their properties. I th-think that's the extent of what he understood."

"But you told Asgore your plans? Even if he didn't read them?"

"I sent him the initial proposal. Um. And the progress reports, until..."

"Then you did nothing wrong." Gaster continued over Alphys's immediate objections: "It would have been more proper if the king had more awareness of the properties and risks of DT, but... I know Asgore as well as you do." His tendency to leave the nitty-gritty scientific details to his scientists, for one.

Alphys's sobs came only as rough noise, as she had used up her tears. "How could I have done nothing wrong? When th-this is the result?" She could hear the amalgamates squirm over the true lab's tiles behind her. Dust-colored shapes nosed in and out of the edges of her vision.

"Your experimental design is valid. Sometimes the results aren't what we want, despite how much we wish otherwise. That's science. It's how we learn."

The feeling Alphys had - that she was forgetting something - it scraped against her skull. She couldn't seem to get a sense of it beyond the way it jostled among her other thoughts. "I t-told everyone that their families could go home wh-when they first opened their eyes again."

"Yes, that move seemed a bit premature. You waited long enough to take notes? To ensure it wasn't a fluke?"

"I-I just..." Alphys couldn't look at him, even though Gaster seemed accessible only by a sort of blindsight. "I-it’s been so long since the last human fell, and when I saw people... opening their eyes after f-falling down... It f-felt like hope." _It didn't seem fair to keep it to myself._ She wasn't entirely sure she said that last bit aloud, but this was a dream, so maybe it didn't matter.

Gaster said nothing, but his mouth and hands lay still in what seemed like an attentive silence, not a chastising one.

"I'm such a fraud," Alphys continued. "I forgot you -! I can't _believe_ -! I put my name on your research-!" Again, that mental twitch, the ineffable thought budging up and trying to make space for itself among her conscious mind. "-a-and I t-told Asgore that I built a robot with a synthetic SOUL, but Mettaton's actually just a b-body for a ghost. The DT's all your work, and that m-must be where I messed up. I didn't know enough about- I thought it was my research and- I didn't know enough-" That thought she couldn't quite place had reached a roar in her mind, as loud as the waterfall that cascaded into the abyss in the garbage dump. "I sh-should resign."

"Alphys, I've told you. Your work in robotics is remarkable; I haven’t seen anyone interface magic and machinery as elegantly and efficiently as you do. I don't know why you felt the need to present your results as something other than what they are. The work itself stands on its own quite well without the claim of artificial SOULs." A sigh, this time carrying the buzz of distortion that came with speaking wingdings. "Are you at least taking notes on the amalgamates? Their reactions to stimuli? The state of their SOULs?" Alphys's cringe was all the answer he needed. "Well, it's not-" This time, he was the one to stumble over his words. "-not too late to start making... goodchoices."

His word choice made him sound like Sans's kid brother. The only other skeletons she knew... Wait. Wait, why had it taken her so long to wonder if they were related somehow... Gaster was supposed to be the only skeleton to survive the War, but then these two...

The ineffable thought broke through. "G----r?" The name came distorted from her mouth. "G----r - Sans and Papyrus - what did you do? You knew them, right? You... _had them_ in your lab-" G----r's face was wrong. He still had that bad eye and the fresh twin cracks that folded in on his skull like a paper fan, but there was also a sense of... dripping. Almost like the amalgamates, but... worse. It seeped into the creases in her scales where his bones made contact. "They're _kids_ what did you do to them?" She knew her voice was growing shrill and panicked. She tried vainly to stabilize it as distortions crept into the waveforms - distortions that sounded like the chirps of wingdings - like the chirps of wingdings modulated further into something only slightly more signal than static - and the sound wasn't coming from her, was it? Someone had pushed him from her grasp, and he was falling into the wall ahead, as though blue magic had shifted the tug of gravity, but Alphys couldn't see the glow on his SOUL and- and- and- she didn't know if she should - if she should – _she should hold out a claw to grab him..._

\----

Alphys awoke slumped over her desk, aware of the crick in her back and cold ink stains down her shirtsleeve. Sometime during her sleep, her pen must have burst, Endogeny had curled up and liquified over her feet and tail with a hefty non-Newtonian viscosity, and Watchingman had draped a shower curtain over her shoulders. The rake-thin amalgamate still hovered there, just beyond her sight, patting her crest. For a moment, Alphys looked at the amalgamates with a kind of fondness, tossing a few affectionate lightning bolt bullets in acknowledgment of their malformed but well-meaning overtures. For a moment, she had the sense that she hadn't screwed up as badly as she had thought, and that there was still something salvageable and good that could be wrested from this fiasco.

Then the creeping oily thoughts seeped back in, and Alphys felt the cold unshakable knowledge that the roots that fed that mindset had been poisoned by DT a long time ago.

**Author's Note:**

> So... guess which ding dong didn't notice the parallels between Alphys and Handplates!Gaster until about, say, a month ago? So I wanted to write something exploring those parallels and also as a means of re-evaluating how much Alphys should bear the blame of the disaster that was the creation of the amalgamates, since I really hated her for it when I first played UT.
> 
> Gaster here is partially constructed from Alphys's dreaming subconscious (how else can she automatically understand spoken wingdings?), but... I actually don't know if he's OOC? How _does_ Gaster feel about his work and his sons now that he's nonlinear? Does he still feel justified? Partially justified, just missing key information? Does he realize what error(s) doomed him?


End file.
